It was another exciting and very loud night in my neighbourhood. The Raptors were playing and defeating the Golden State Warriors in Oakland, California. But as they do every game thousands of Raptor fans had gathered in the place they call Jurassic Park, to watch the game on giant TVs and cheer on their heroes. And when the Raptors won the party went on for hours.
Dear young Canadians, I have waited until the last moment to send out this message encouraging you to vote tomorrow. But I have worked with many of you for over six months in different groups and committees, so a lot of you know where I am coming from. And all all I want to do in these last critical hours is to repeat my message I have tried to hammer home. Vote as if your lives depended upon it, for that couldn't be more true.
As you probably know, I believe that one of the most important things progressives must do is reach out to young Canadians and encourage them to vote. Not just because if they did vote in greater numbers we could crush the ghastly Cons who are destroying our country and torching their future. But also because they could help build a better Canada.
About half the young Canadians I know are either unemployed or have lousy low paying jobs. Jobs with no guaranteed hours, no job security, no benefits, no nothing. They are exploited like slaves in their own country, and are struggling to survive. So you can imagine how I feel about Stephen Poloz's idiot idea.
Lordy. For a moment the other day I thought that I might have to change my poster for Jason Kenney's leadership campaign, fearing that he had finally gone over the deep end. And that the combination of his sagging personal popularity, his sinking leadership chances, and/or his painful chastity vows, had caused him to lose control of himself. For what else could explain this Twitter explosion?
On my way home this evening I passed by a young guy sitting on the edge of the pier his legs dangling over the edge staring into the frozen lake. And for a moment, until I checked him out, a horrible thought came into my mind. Because despair is in the air. You can cut it with a knife. Enough bodies trapped under the ice in the winter, float to the surface in the spring. And in the darkness of this hideous Harperland, young Canadians are the forgotten victims.
Their protest may be angry but unfocused. They have been ignored by the MSM. Brutalized by the police, and arrested in massive numbers.
But slowly but surely Occupy Wall Street is rediscovering the radical imagination.
We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.
Is it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?
And who would be surprised if it happened here? Where the fat cats and the union-busting Harper Cons are trying to turn young Canadians into slaves.
The CEOs have decided. The value of young people is lower than the value of people from my generation. You don’t deserve the same salary, even if you are better educated. You don’t deserve the same vacation time or health benefits. And you certainly don’t deserve to have the same kind of secure retirement. It’s just not in the business plan.
With the same predictable result.
When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.
On my way home this evening, I stopped by City Hall to check out this improvised and rapidly growing memorial to Jack Layton.
Where people were dropping by to write chalk messages to the lost leader.
On the ground...
Or on a large wall...
And then when I got home, I read a story by Barbara Yaffe, who like most of the media loons in the Ottawa pond, was echoing the plaintive call of the Con media: Jack is gone, so the NDP is doomed.
Canada is not a socialist-minded country. Of 10 provinces, only Manitoba and Nova Scotia have New Democrat premiers. Canadians never have installed an NDP government federally. In Quebec, the NDP's recent success federally flowed from a political vacuum left by a sudden collapse in the Bloc Quebecois' following.
With Layton's passing Monday, his party now faces the prospect of losing much of the support it had from voters who were attracted by Layton himself.
And it made me wonder if any of those predictable loons knows what they're talking about. Because like most of those wretched scribblers, Yaffe can't seem to see the forest for the trees. Or in this case the writing on the wall.
These troubled economic times couldn't be BETTER for a social-democratic party. And the NDP may have lost a great leader, but Layton has bequeathed them and other progressive Canadians, something even more powerful: a real dyed in the wool Canadian myth.
Do you know how much a myth is worth in a country starved of them? Jack's tragic death, the person he was, and the message he left behind, have given progressives a secular saint for a better world, that we can hold up like a candle, or wield like a weapon.
One that will shelter the new NDP MPs as they wander through the Valley of Con Death, help excuse any rookie mistakes they might make, neutralize the "separatist" slander that will be excreted in their direction.
And most importantly, mobilize young Canadians to their side, by giving them somebody to believe in. At last.
Because there they were on their knees today...
One after the other.
Writing love messages to Jack...
For he did so believeth in THEM.
Now they believeth in HIM...
And when you ask them to win one for Jack they will. And so will a lot of other Canadians.
You know the Cons know the power of a myth, and they are afraid.
The setup is tempting: Ailing leader, cane in hand, bravely hobbles through an election campaign with a wince and smile, leading his troops to shocking, unprecedented triumph — only to die prematurely and gracefully like a monarch butterfly.
That’s the martyr part. NDP strategists, no idealistic fools, know martyrdom is gold at the ballot box.
And so they should be.
Glory Hallelujah !!! I want to be an altar boy in the Church of Jack Layton !!!!
Where goodness RULES.
Stephen Harper and his Cons are the Satanic Hordes.
If you want to survive Canada's Summer of Anger, there are two subjects you absolutely must NOT discuss with your fellow hosers.
One...who is to blame for the Vancouver riot? Because chances are you'll have to listen to some deranged rant about how young people are inherently dumb and dangerous. How they HUMILIATED Canada. And how they should be shamed, jailed, whipped, and their lives ruined FOREVER.
Because then you might have to listen to a lengthy and foamy diatribe about how those unionized workers are lazy, greedy, PARASITES, who are giving themselves juicy pensions with OUR tax dollars. And how DARE they have a pension when I don't ???!!!
When in fact:
(1) The postal service workers make millions and millions of dollars in PROFIT for the government. They don't depend on the largesse of taxpayers, and the only people that do are the ones with the best performing pensions in the country.
(2) The attempt to create two kinds of workers at Canada Post is part of a larger campaign to do away with pensions altogether, and an all out assault on the rights of young Canadians.
The CEOs have decided. The value of young people is lower than the value of people from my generation. You don’t deserve the same salary, even if you are better educated. You don’t deserve the same vacation time or health benefits. And you certainly don’t deserve to have the same kind of secure retirement. It’s just not in the business plan.
(3) Stephen Harper and his Cons are out to destroy public pensions, and what's left of the union movement in Canada. Because for them and the big business porkers, pensions are SOCIALISM. And unions are The Enemy.
And they know that if young Canadians are barely able to support themselves, they'll be less likely to join a union, and less able or willing to support the elderly.
So we'll ALL suffer, the race to the bottom will continue, and people will end up gnawing on each other in the darkness of a capitalist jungle. While the fat cats look down on us from their fortresses or their executive jets, rattle their jewels, swill their champagne, and laugh their porky asses off.
Which is when I start thinking of what happened in Vancouver. And wonder what might happen when young Canadians realize that their future has been stolen, their planet has been torched. And find a REAL reason to riot...
But for Godzilla's sake, whatever you do, don't mention that to anyone you don't know really well eh? Or you might be attacked or publicly SHAMED.
Even though that won't change the truth: Or there will be justice, or there will be trouble.
And this too is true:
If you are under the age of 35, pay close attention. Your standard of living, and that of your children, is being decided right now in the boardroom, the workplace and even on the picket line. Sooner rather than later, you will need to pick a side.
We are heading for an ideological and generational struggle the likes of which most Canadians can't even IMAGINE.
The Cons and their corporate masters are preparing to wage war on young and old Canadians.
I came across this little old steam engine today. Every evening it steams into a nearby tent for a performance of The Railway Children.
Normally I would just admire its toy-like beauty. But after what happened last week, all I could think about was the journey we are on. Into The Great Darkness.
It's going to be a long five years, but this gives me hope.
A new poll suggests the NDP is the hands-down favourite party among an increasingly mobilized youth.
It indicates that support for the NDP among young people was leaps and bounds ahead of the other parties in every region of the country except Alberta and it grew during the campaign.
The old parties and the corporate media can mock them.
It's still an old person's Canada.
But nothing will attract more young people to politics than the sight of all those young MPs. Nothing will motivate them more than seeing their own kind attacked.
If Jack Layton and the Quebec surprise hadn't brought them to Ottawa how else would they have got there?
If the NDP can mentor them, and show them off, even more young people will join that party.
And by the time the train pulls into the next election, those who are 13-years-old today will get to to vote, and they could change EVERYTHING.
(click pic to enlarge)
Yup. It will be a long journey.
There will be some very dark times.
But I'm riding the little toy train with the youth of Canada.
The poll finds that 47 per cent of young respondents in Canada feel that it is more important for society to reward individual performance than to share prosperity more equitably. That compares with 39 per cent of their elders.
Indeed, 54 per cent of young people in Canada (about the same as in the U.S.) say they want to "earn a lot of money" -only in China and India is the eagerness for wealth greater.
As well, 62 per cent of young Canadians say an ideal society should be characterized by the lowest possible taxes rather than by the optimal social benefits (exceeded only by the Americans, at 72 per cent). And 44 per cent of the Canadians say they are not ready to pay for retirees' social benefits.
Great eh? Watch out granny, watch out world, here come our little greedsters.
I must say I have trouble believing this poll. I haven't the slightest interest in being piggy rich. Neither do most of my friends. And although some of them are really struggling to pay the bills, none of us would even THINK of not supporting seniors.
But then I suppose nobody should be surprised if some young Canadians are really that greedy.They are bathed in a culture where money means success. And live in a country where Stephen Harper's Cons promote the cult of the individual. Where taxes are bad, and community is communism.
But I'm sure they'll soon learn the hard way that most of them are NEVER going to be rich. The Cons are just the useful idiots of Big Business who want to turn Canada into a jungle. Without a sense of community we will never save this country. Or the planet.
And of course that money isn't everything.
But then I could be wrong and in that case we're in big trouble eh?
So what will it be I wonder?
Young and old TOGETHER? Community makes us stronger and better, and greed is a Con disease?
Or one, two, three, four, pick up the cell phone and fire off the beer cannon?
And party until they JAIL us?
Or four, three, two, one, where did the future go?
He thought he could get away with it. He said it was just routine. He said Canadians didn't care about torture. He said he needed to recalibrate. Even though Canadians knew it was just a paid vacation. He counted on the Con media to shrug its shoulders, praise him for being so clever. And smother the Facebook rebellion with cynicism. Or drown it in this crock of stinking shite.
As if young Canadians were too stupid to care about saving democracy and their country. So what are these MSM Con stooges saying now? About this and this. Let me suggest something along these lines might be appropriate: Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo. We live in a dank little village called Ottawa. We walk around with our heads up our asses. We polish Great Ugly Leader's bum with our noses. We think cynical is cool. So how could we possibly know how irrelevant we have become? Or how tragically complacent these Con collaborators have helped make us. Mr Harper is doubtless counting on the Winter Olympics to reinforce Canadians’ familiar political complacency. But he has given the opposition, which is divided and fumbling, an opportunity. It is now up to it to show that Canada cannot afford a part-time Parliament that sits only at the prime minister’s pleasure.
You know it hurts to have a British magazine suggest that we are too dumb to care about our democracy. One more humiliation that this country must endure. Planet burners, torture freaks, and now authoritarian dummies. But the fact is we have been spectators rather than citizens for far too long. Looking on helplessly as these monstrous alien Cons raped our country and its values. And this revolt is the best thing to happen to Canada since this one...
When we took to the streets, and raised our voices to let Harper and his political thugs know exactly what we thought of them. Which is what we must do again on January 23rd when anti-prorogation rallies will be held across Canada. To send one message to the tyrant. Get back to work. Take your grubby hands off our democracy. And another message to the Con media... you can shove your sickening, deadening cynicism where the sun don't shine.
Because we are better than you. Young Canadians want their country back.
And the uprising is NOW...
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P.S. Don't feel left out if you're not on Facebook. Just do what you can to spread the word about the rallies, make sure you and your friends attend, and I'll make a list of all the times and places here.
Good Lawdy. It must be Blame Somebody Anybody Week. First Stephen Harper blames our refugee system for letting too many darkies... or people with strange names... into Canada. Now Lawrence Martin investigates why Canada is becoming such a boring old country, and ends up blaming young people. The young reject the political status quo, as they should, but they are too lazy to do anything about it. Most of the under-25s don't even bother to vote. Instead of fighting for change, they wallow in their vanities and entitlements. Not much turns them on except the Idol shows, movies with smut humour and the latest hand-held instruments. Which is absolutely absurd....and insulting. Martin is right about some things. Many young Canadians are not properly engaged in the political life of their country. But it's not because they are lazy or idiots...although some of them are. It's because the political parties can't reach or motivate them. And they are being crushed by the greed and depleted idealism of those older than them.
Since the employment peak of October 2008, some 205,000 youths aged 15-24 have lost their jobs, almost half of the 414,000 total jobs lost in that time.
Like how are they going to pay for soaring education bills without being poor for twenty years...or spending their lives flipping hamburgers in a hollowed out country? Or how are they going to stay out of jail in a country that once promised to decriminalize marijuana? But now wants to lockup even more young people for no sane reason. Or most importantly, how are they going to live and raise their own children in a world torched and torn apart by global warming? When we live in a country where people care more about their cars than they do about the future of the world. And even the leader of the Liberal party thinks that Alberta's dirty oil sands are a good thing...not an environmental nightmare....and Canada's SHAME.
And how can they vote for those Liberals when, according to the same EKOS poll, 44 % of them think the country is heading in the RIGHT direction? And one third of them would choose Harper's Conservatives as their SECOND choice. But then how can they really support the NDP or the Greens, the political parties closest to their hearts? Or at least closest to mine. When they know that older people are too stuffy to follow them, and all they are really doing is further dividing the left, and making it easier for Stephen Harper's Cons to win a MAJORITY. So they can destroy the rights of gay people, restrict access to abortion and murder medicare. You know I do believe that demographics is DESTINY. But I also know some old people who are more idealistic and younger at heart than some of my own friends. Who are living on toast and macaroni and are full of despair. And when I look out over the Canada I love I see a country in a political rut that is going absolutely NOWHERE. With progressives that attack each other more than they attack the dirty Cons.... or living in denial. Even as the country's values shrivel. Even as Canadians suffer. Even as the planet BURNS. So while it's easy to blame the young, or the epic fail of the older generation, I blame EVERYONE. And this is my song...
But don't call me an idiot eh? For saying what nobody wants to hear. Because I still believe in a better Canada and a better world. I'm just running out of HOPE....
